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After the five million album sale success of 'Clandestino' and the production helm with the blind Malians Amadou and Mariam on 'Dimanche A Bamako', singer-producer Manu Chao's looping guitar rhythms are back to bring some funky business. 'La Radiolina', Italian for Transistor Radio, was some six years in the making and has celebration at its core, drenched as it is in polyphonic rhythms formed from recyclings of backing tracks - a habit formed from time spent backpacking with a portable studio. Having counted Joe Strummer amongst his fans, The Clash influences are rife with Bob Marley affectations on a rousing romp that finds the averaging 2 1/2 minute songs tumbling over into each other as Manu plays out the musical lexicon of world, pop, reggae, punk and flamenco.
The galloping mariachi hillbilly punk of 'El Pais' sets the jamboree feel, and Manu's leftist-libertario bent is given expression on the mariachi with a message of 'Politik Kills', stripping the political machine to the bones - "...politik needs ignorance...politik needs lies...politik is violence...". 'Rainin In Paradize' sets the town on fire with what appears to be a cross of Plastic Bertrand 'Ca Plane Pour Moi' and The Timewarp as they scuttle along a 120mph celestial race-track with the fuse lit as Manu rhymes atrocity with democracy in reference to Baghdad.
North African rhythms show through on 'Besoin La Lune', the Spanish lines translating as "...I need my father to tell me where I come from/ I need my mother when I am lost..." tell of the roving life, while the Flamenco/Euro-pop fused 'El Kitapena' and 'La Vida Tombola' strike closer to a European home, the explorer climes on the ska-infused 'A Cosa' take a Caribbean soaking, and 'The Bleedin Clown' has a punky/new wave swagger with English verse, and 'El Hoyo' explores rhythmic possibility on a track that takes world punk into a reggae rub-down.
Moments such as 'Mala Fama' help to catch breath with a heartfelt mariachi, and 'Otro Mundo' dresses in a minstrel garb, but the rhythms of 'La Radiolina' prove as infectious as foot and mouth disease. Avoiding the production cacophony found on Polyphonic Sprees's 'The Fragile Army', 'La Radiolina' pastes and loops sounds to form a scrapbook of Manu's travels and wayfaring, a songbook in the fight for the disenfranchised. A Candomble Priestess once told him that he was a song of Shango, the fearsome Yoruba, God of thunder. Having played in Mexico City to crowds of 100,000, there's a political engagement bedded deep down in his convictions and thunder cast in the rhythms that may implore the English-speaking world sit up and take notice. Failing that, groove!
